| Changing the Tide |
Blue Ocean Strategy helps entrepreneurs identify new ways of doing business.Many businesses in today's market are functioning in an environment pundits refer to as the Red Ocean Strategy. The analogy serves to invoke images of a pool of sharks all fighting over the same lunch offerings, the result being that a lot of sharks are getting a little lunch rather than any one shark getting the five-course meal, creating a red pool in the process.The theory is that many business owners, represented in this context as the sharks, are all going after the same customer, or the object of the sharks' desires, rather than developing a business strategy that competes on more than price and feature lists. The Blue Ocean Strategy, proposed by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in their book of the same name, argues that in a "red ocean of bloody competition", business owners can create a new market space with their existing products by identifying new demand, rather than meeting the needs of the current demand. While most of Kim's and Mauborgne's research is based on companies that have grown to international status with recognizable brand names (Yellow Tail wine and Cirque de Soleil, for example), subscribers of blue ocean maintain the strategy can, and successfully has been, applied at the small- and medium-sided business level. Click here for more information, and a list of references, about and for Blue Ocean Strategy. |
